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Monthly Archives: December 2012

Although this is my third post, written on December 17th, this post appears in pole position at the top because it was the original Hello World post, auto-generated by the initialization of this site. Rather than simply delete it, I left it in place so that I could go back, as I am now doing, and place here some kind of explanation (or at least an attempt at description) as to what I am trying to do here.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a devotee of Reason. A rational approach to life, I have believed, is the best, most pragmatic and most successful approach one can use. And even now, my commitment to Reason is unwavering and total.

But that is not what this blog type dealio is about.

You see, while the analytic and intellectual part of my nature has been served well by Reason, pragmatism, and a rational approach, there are other parts of my nature that Reason does not fulfill. The spectrum of emotions I feel when listening to effective music – from deep sadness to boundless joy. The sense of transcendence and revelation I experience from storytelling – whether that be from a book, movie, or TV show, or whether that be from a story constructed by myself and friends in a role-playing game session. And of course, the fundamental human needs that most have for purpose, meaning, context.

Reason is absolutely the best tool for finding one’s way from where one is now, to where one wants to be. But how do we choose where we want to be? What tells us what we value and why? From where does our context come for not just understanding the world but being a part of it? And how do we embrace a path of self-evolution and becoming a better person – and what do we mean, really, by “better”?

All this is what I mean by Spirituality. I don’t mean belief in the supernatural, or god(s), or crystals, or any of that stuff – not as a matter of factual truth, anyways. Spirituality is not about what is factually and objectively true – that’s what science is for. Spirituality is about what is subjectively true, personally true. It’s about what we feel deep within us. It’s about our experiences, individually and in the interhuman links between us. Spirituality is the domain of love, not law; the domain of value, not facts; the domain of transcendence and profundity, not of measurement and proof.

Quite simply, spiritual truths are truths of feeling, not truths of being.

Now, if I sound at all like I have a handle on any of this, like I have a clue about what I’m saying, don’t be fooled. I don’t. I’m making it up as I go, trying to figure it out from within the storm of life. It’s kind of like being in a dance hall and hearing some new piece of music. I know I want to dance to it, but I haven’t quite yet got the rhythm down. This site is for just that purpose. I hope any who stumble upon it can find something of value here for themselves, be it a note of similar experience or even basic entertainment. For me, this will be a nonlinear account of my journey as I try to figure out where I’m going. I can hear the music – I just need to figure out how to dance.

In my youth, Reason was the first Big Thing I discovered. It took me years and years to get a handle on the concept and the myriad implications that followed. A set of concentric circles of indirect discovery and subtle yet solid truths, it all starts out with a basic idea, usually called the principle of non-contradiction:

Contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time.

To put it more simply, contradiction is falsehood. Anything that inescapably leads to contradiction is falsehood.

If we claim a box contains only a single apple, we can’t simultaneously claim that it contains also a nectarine. Those two claims contradict each other, they can’t be both true in the same sense at the same time.

It may seem foolish, but this approach, along with a handful of what I sometimes call “primaries” – starting beliefs or assumptions – can get you quite far. So far, in fact, to yield the best (the most likely accurate) approach to understanding the cosmos. Yes, that short idea brings into fruition all of science and math.

Here’s one quick, rough illustration of how someone can leverage such a simple thing into useful, practical results.

Many (if not most) religions are exclusive. That is, the claims they make are not compatible as written with each other. For example, the old Norse religion – with Asgard, Odin, Thor, Loki, etc – is very fundamentally different in its “truths” than the old Greek religion – starring Olympus, Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes, etc. There are similarities, of course, but compare the truths of one with the truths of the other and they simply don’t match up, unless you turn a blind eye, which we will not.

The fact is, the Norse religion could be true. It’s possible that upon dying you may wake up in Valhalla. Alternatively, the Greek religion might be the true one – perhaps you might find yourself on the slopes of Mount Olympus after death. Or it could be some other religion – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the list goes on and on. Any of them might be the true one. Of course, another option might be that none of them are accurate. It may be that upon death, you die, and you don’t ever wake up anywhere else.

The thing is, while we can talk about the science of the mind, what if anything happens supernaturally after death is not a subject anyone can prove or disprove. The Greek and Norse religions are as valid now as they were when everyone believed them – and will continue being so.

So that means it’s OK for people to believe whatever they want about what happens after death, since they can’t be proven wrong – after all they might just turn out to be right, yes?

Actually, if you apply Reason, you will see that such a choice is not rational. This is why:

Whatever the justification someone uses to believe that the Norse religion is really true, it’s the same justification the person following the Greek religion is using. And yet this justification yields two very different religions that contradict each other.

Therefore the tool that produced such contradictory “truths” is itself invalid, and simply must not be used as justification.

In fact, only the kinds of justifications that do NOT produce contradictory facts are useable, are valid.

And there we have it. Starting from the abstract principle of non-contradiction, we end up at a practical yardstick for what is a permissible justification for our beliefs and what isn’t.

Of course, that’s just one simple admittedly off-the-cuff example of how to get pragmatic results from Reason. There are countless more examples: all of science and math result from Reason applied to our observations of the universe.

I will go one step further, and state what most rational people think or feel:

Reason is the ONLY appropriate tool for understanding the objective truths of the universe, for discovering facts and knowledge relating to anything that we can claim exists. If Reason cannot deliver a truth to us, it is better not to pretend to know such a “truth”. Or to put another way, sometimes the only rational answer to a question is “We don’t (yet) know.”

Reason alone – and all that is generated by it (like math and science) – is the sole and only arbiter of factual truth. If asked “Does X exist, is X real?”, Reason is the only valid way to find the answer – and the answer will either be yes, no, or “we don’t know (yet)”.

So when a religion says “the earth sits on the back of a giant turtle” and claims that idea is factually true, the religion has overstepped its bounds onto Reason’s court. There are still vast spaces for religion and spirituality to expand into: explorations of value, metaphor, purpose, intent, personal evolution, and so on.

But when it comes to factual and objective truth, it has to be justified using the tools of Reason. It has to be proved. The only reason to accept any statement as true, ultimately, is because to not do so would be demonstrably irrational – that is, lead to a contradiction.

Now it’s perfectly fine for religions to have metaphors, creation stories of the world to teach and inspire us. Just so long as no one tries to claim that these stories are factually true. Even when they claim something small – for example, the existence of a city in the ancient past located at such-and-such a place. If no proof of this place is found, then it is a story, not a demonstrable fact. And if proof of this city is found – say archaeological remains – then the proof isn’t the religious writings, it’s the result of the science of archaeology, a branch of science, the daughter of Reason. We can only come to factual truth through Reason or its descendants.

This is the core life philosophy I have been on a journey discovering and developing for the last few decades – that to know truth you must know Reason – and that if you ignore or subjugate Reason, you no longer have truth.

I thought that was it, that no more was needed. After all, if Reason is the sole avenue to all truth about the world, about what is and isn’t, about basically everything in the cosmos, than why would anyone need anything more, right?

Actually, no. As it turns out, Reason is sufficient to give us factual truth, objective truth – but understanding this world and how it works is not enough. It is not enough to answer the question how – we still have the need to understand why.

And we also need to do more than understand stuff. We need to connect. We need to find our place. We need to figure out how we should live our lives and why. Sometimes we need stillness to look within, other times we need the support of a close community.

We need to pursue regular transcendent and meaningful experiences that resonate with depth and profundity.

Life isn’t just about understanding the facts of the world, the science, math, and history. That’s just the beginning of living life – knowing what’s what. But after embracing Reason and the truths that flow from it, many new questions follow, questions that Reason cannot answer on its own:

What’s next? Why bother? How can I feel most alive? How do I get what I need?

What do I need?

This is the domain of Spirituality, I think. This is where you go when Reason’s work is done – or at least well underway.

I am a devotee of Reason, and an Atheist. I don’t have any use or time for the supernatural. I am convinced that the only road to truths about our universe is through the application of Reason. (You may be well served by clickinghere to read more about that, before going further.)

And yet, I know there’s more to the pursuit of living our lives than simply knowing factual truth.

Spirituality is one of those vague words that means everything to everyone. However, it is not my intent to hide behind vagueness to pretend we all agree on the same stuff. I would rather dig into it, and get at the heart of the matter. And I think that heart lies in what I will call the Inner World.

To be clear, these Worlds I will be describing are metaphors. I am not saying that there really are two worlds. I am really saying that there are two approaches, two paradigms – each one appropriate in the proper time and place.

The Outer World is the obvious one. It is the world we all share, the world of facts and of factual truth, the world of science, math, and history. The world not of perceived reality, but actual reality. Differences of opinion, values, intentions – none of those matter here, the only thing that is relevant is the answer to the questions of “What exists (or has existed, or will exist?)” and “How do things happen?” – not why, mind you, but how.

The Inner World however, while being immanent, is less blatant as it lies casually and quietly draped over the Outer World. The Inner World is everything we feel, everything we think, everything we believe, and more. It contains both value and context, interpretation and intent.

In the Outer World, what’s true for one is true for all. In the Inner World, on the other hand, that is often not the case. I’ll try to give some examples:

One person grew up excelling in academics. To them a No. 2 pencil is a reminder of their skill. Another person had a father that worked at a pencil manufacturing company, who was laid off as digital content drove the demand for pencils to historic lows.

Seated at a desk, both see the same pencil in the cup with regard to its Outer World existence – they both see the pencil as yellow, solid, sharpened, the eraser fresh and unused. However, with regard to the Inner World, one sees the pencil as a badge of achievement while the other finds it a depressing reminder of what was lost. And both people have real and visceral reactions to its presence.

A less whimsical example is this: one person believes that freedom is the highest, most noble goal – that a person’s freedom is sacred. Another person believes that while freedom is important, we all have a mandatory obligation to help our fellow human, like it or not – that one person’s freedom of choice ends where another person’s true need begins. And so the first believes that people are only entitled to that which they can get on their own, while the second maintains that a person of means owes some portion of what they have to those who are living in abject poverty.

To be clear, the discussion about the effects that occur to the economy or government when certain actions are taken or not taken, while many people may have differing opinions on the matter, is not a matter of opinion, but fact. It is an Outer World problem of “If we do X, what will follow?” That’s a question of factual truth.

But the question of whether we ought to do X (or Y) – of which values we shall live by, or what outcomes we deem worthy – that is an Inner World question.

And it’s not just about philosophy and conditioning. Think of the finest piece of music you have ever heard, the one that moved you more than any other before or since. The music that took ahold of your very self, down to your toes. Or think of that scene in that movie, or TV show, or book, that gave you a moment in time that took your breath away. Maybe it brought you to tears, or filled you with joy, or brought you up off of the couch, vibrant with success.

These emotional experiences aren’t fake. They aren’t meaningless. Quite the opposite. The more they make you feel, the more compelling they are, the more a kernel of your spirit is coming alive. This is also part of the Inner World.

Let’s shift our terminology a little. The phrases Inner World and Outer World are evocative, but it’s simpler just to use the terms “spiritual” and “secular”.

The domain of secular truth is the domain of Reason, of facts, of the so-called Outer World that’s the same for everybody.

The domain of spiritual truth is the domain of feeling, sentiment, experience, value, and personal “reality” – what we’ve been calling the Inner World. Reason still holds sway here – but only to guard us from error, not to guide us to our base choices – because those base choices come from the deepest parts of us.

One way perhaps to get right the division of what is secular and what is spiritual is to get at the base dichotomy by looking at our very mind and spirit. What are they?

The mind is, in short, the collection of neurochemical impulses and fields resident within the brain. Brain and mind sciences have shown that this is the factual, dry, objective truth of what we are. To put another way, with regard to the fact-based secular truth, the essential truth of what we are is our minds, and that which influences our minds.

The spirit, on the other hand, is also us. It’s our values, our sense of right and wrong, our appreciation for art and music, our love for those dear to us, and our capacity for personal evolution and depth. It is the spiritual truth of who we are.

So if the mind is the secular truth of what we are, and the spirit is the spiritual truth of who we are – what does that mean?

It means that the mind and the spirit are the same thing, and that each interpretation is correct within the proper context.

Mind and spirit are two side of the same coin. Researchers can hook us up to machines that can tell us exactly what happens in our brains when we experience love, for example. They can even isolate what causes those feelings and perhaps even trigger it at will.

Still, that is not the meaning of love, it is merely the process. If you want to understand the neurochemical basis for the experience of love in our brains, you turn to Reason and science – for that’s a secular question.

But if you want to experience love more fully, to be more worthy of love, to “walk” in love and embrace the aspect being loving in your life – that’s a matter of the spirit. That’s a spiritual issue.

Everything divides into one or the other, into a question of fact – where we have no leeway or flexibility, or a question of personal truth – where it’s really up to us, to what appeals to us, to what moves us.

I have spent most of my life until now, in my mid 40s, focusing only on matters of Reason, on secular questions – yet almost all of the really important questions are spiritual matters.

So now I realize that I must begin a new journey. Without questioning the undeniable right of Reason to reign supreme for all secular matters, I need to go beyond (though not in the face of) Reason to discover my spiritual path.

I need to discover/create my own spirituality.

While Reason is never to be abandoned, not even in spiritual matters, Reason alone is not sufficient to find your way in this place. After all, all Reason can do is tell you what to avoid (contradictions and that which leads to them) – which is all you need for the secular stuff, but not enough to get you anywhere specific for the spiritual.

We’ve discussed Reason and Spirituality, and now we frame my intentions here at Stumbling Forward. There are two endeavors I am embracing by writing SF, and they are (in no special order):

Creating/discovering a sound grounding in understanding the overall structure, function, and experience of spirituality, especially as potentially practiced by people of reason. Learning over-arching spiritual truths that apply to the endeavor of spirituality as a whole, possibly regardless of which exact spirituality is focused on. Thus, seeking the common elements and experiences that all or most spiritualities share.

Finding, creating, and/or tailoring a specific spirituality for my personal spiritual needs, a spirituality that can provide me what my spirit craves in the manner and mode which nourishes it best. This likely may also entail finding or building a community of people to share this journey with.

Those are my two goals – and I haven’t ruled out the possibility that the answer to the first one may in and of itself provide the second – which would be something amazing if it worked out that way.

In the process of, well, stumbling forward on both goals, I will be considering all kinds of ideas and processes, chronicling my greatly imperfect journey post by post in the SF blog. As I come to specific understandings, I will add pages to “bookmark” these ideas – like the pages for Reason and Spirituality referenced above. However, expect to see even these anchors change and evolve over time as the journey unfolds.

Other pages to keep an eye on (which will be coming soon) are:

The Glossary – a handy reference for not just words used here that may seem unfamiliar, but also for checking to find out the exact way familiar words may used in an unfamiliar or novel context. Spirit is a common word, for example, but to find out exactly what that word means here check our Glossary.

The Summary – an ever-evolving set of “Cliff’s Notes” of the base structure being developed here. While not as readable and illustrated as the more detailed pages and posts, it’s a good basic breakdown of the current state of the site, a “TL:DR”, if you will.

I hope that any of you who stumble over this blog will find my stumbling entertaining, illuminating, thought-provoking, perhaps all three. Ultimately I hope that some time from now I can look back of my notes on this journey – represented by this site itself – and gather from it an integrated and complete answer that serves my two intentions.

For those who need a briefer summary of what is in this website, the TL:DR version:

There are two “worlds”, the secular and the spiritual. The secular world is the world of facts and reality. The spiritual world is the world of values, context, meaning, and experience.

The Covenant is both the idea that we ought to acknowledge the above truth and the commitment to treating the secular differently from the spiritual: all secular matters are governed by Reason alone, and all spiritual matters are governed by whatsoever is called from within us so to do.

A key concept of the Covenant is immanence – the idea that even if the object of our experience is not demonstrably real, the experience we have is nevertheless very real, and quite possibly very meaningful.

However, fact-based statements such as “God exists” are actually secular, not spiritual, and as such must be justified as necessarily true (not just potentially true) or discarded.

Still, one can still have the experience of praying to one’s god, listening to the god, even being in that god’s presence without the god’s existence being factually (and secularly) true, and these experiences and practices lose not one whit of their spiritual meaning in the process. This is the true meaning of immanence.

Any religion, belief, or spirituality is potentially compatible with the Covenant, so long as all secular statements or claims made are discarded. For example, so long as the creation story of the Christian Bible is not taken to be factually true, it may still be embraced for the lessons and meanings it contains.

The goals of this website are two-fold: to rationally understand the base nature of spirituality as a whole, and to develop a set of spiritual beliefs and practices (and hopefully an associated community) to answer the needs of the author of this website and others.

I had a dream last night that I was with my Dad. (My long dead stepfather, not my biodad – but my stepfather was the only Dad I knew for most of my life, so to me he is just Dad – or Bob.) In this dream, which I now can recall only vaguely, I was helping him tend to some outdoor stuff – digging or planting, or something.

I’ll skip right over the fact that I am very much an indoor person and don’t dig or plant, to get to the heart of it.

I was with my Dad. I was keeping company with him. Despite the fact that he’s be dead for over a decade.

Now, as will be more and more obvious, I don’t think I was really, factually, with him last night. I am a devotee of reason, and don’t believe in the factual truth of the supernatural. It was a dream, nothing more. Factually.

But this got me to thinking – perhaps while it is inarguably true that I wasn’t with my father factually, perhaps it is equally factually true that nevertheless I had the very real experience of being with him. In other words, perhaps an experience can be true and real, even if the object of the experience is not.

Food for thought, right?

In other musings, it occurs to me that I will have to think deeper on my twin goals of creating an over-arching meta-framework for spirituality while also separately coming up with my own personal implementation of it. Perhaps the meta-framework can be not just a framework, but a valid instance of itself, in it’s own right whilst still being useful as a template for other spiritualities.

Another thought that just occurred, it’s value potentially anywhere between worthless and priceless (which, in a way, have the same price tag, grin):

A spiritual journey is one where you are looking for answers that only after you find them, you realize you knew all along – but it takes that journey to reveal it. Perhaps the purpose of the journey wasn’t to find the answers, but to discover that you already knew them.

That rings true to my spiritual ears – but it could be nothing more than new-age sounding BS. Or it could be something real.

I mean to find that out.

Update: Someone just suggested to me that this is like Dorothy’s journey (Wizard of Oz), where it was only at the end that she found out that she had the means of returning home with her all along.

Just wanted to note (for posterity?) that this entire website is a WIP – work in progress.

Specifically, that can (and will) mean any and all of the following:

Parts of the site may be buggy or look wrong. If anyone sees such a glitch, feel free to drop me a line at benn@4efix.com

Likewise, some links may be non-functional – either because the content is “Coming Soon(tm)” or because the link itself is broken.

Any page or post can be reworked and rewritten to better make it’s point. For example, I will probably be writing and re-writing the main Reason and Spirituality pages on an ongoing basis – both to better put forth the desired thoughts, and to reflect a hopefully evolving understanding.

As with many blogs, but especially with this one, the posts are in no specific order – I just post ideas as I think of them. For orderly examinations, check out the pages in the top nav bar – the blog posts are far more stream of consciousness.

This post itself represents (in quite a meta way) an evolving chunk of data – as I think of other things that belong here, I will go back and add them.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or constructive criticism, please don’t hesitate to email me at benn@4efix.com

It occurs to me that not only do people have different belief systems – different spiritualities – they have different ways of expressing and celebrating them. For example, while it’s true that several of the Christian franchises may have some differing creeds or fundamentals, one of the most obvious differences amongst them is how they engage in their beliefs.

One church I went to was filled to the rafters with “a joyful noise.” There was great song, a very emotive experience. Another church was a very somber affair, very serious, very rigid and traditional. A third seemed almost more community oriented and all inclusive to the point of vagueness. All three were basically standard Christian churches, but the experience each member went to have was utterly different.

This I think points to a different dimension of spirituality. It’s not just about what you embrace, but the form and method of your embracement that feels the most appropriate and fulfilling. For some, that’s somber and serious, but for others that’s joyous and enthusiastic.

So even people who share a fundamental similar spirituality – at least as far as the content may find that they nonetheless belong in different choices depending on their mode of worship or observance.

As I examine religions and other spiritualities, there are repeating motifs – not perhaps that surprising since I do believe that most people have fundamentally similar base spiritual needs. And since one of my goals is to understand the patterns of spiritualities while the other is to develop my own, it behooves me on both counts to dig into this – and especially to dig into the rituals, traditions, and practices that seem to exist in one form or another across most spiritualities.

Having a moment of some kind of spiritual communion, for example, is a practice common to most spiritualities. Many western spiritualities enfold that as prayer, while many eastern spiritualities use meditation for that purpose instead – but scratch the surface and you will find both answer a very similar spiritual need.

Or take the passing of wisdom from spiritual leaders to those who gather to hear them. Some call this practice giving a sermon, say call it preaching, some simply call it teaching, depending on the spirituality – but again, the common thread is evident.

There are many of these common traditions or methods. For the sake of this website’s continuing discussion, I will from now own refer to them as “praxes” – or if only talk about one, a “praxis”.

So, a prayer is a spiritual praxis. So is meditation. Sitting outside in stillness listening to nature speak to you can also be a praxis. In fact, it is likely that all three are actually the same praxis in different forms, using different expressions – but ultimately addressing the same need.

It is this collection of praxes that make up the most visible aspect of a spirituality. That and the creed – more on this later.

I guess part of the process of understanding something is learning its parts and pieces, its components. If you want to understand, for example, the Episcopal Church, you could start by learning the various aspects and methods that the Church employs.

To understand spirituality as a whole, however, you aren’t looking at specific components, you’re looking at the templates that they follow. You have to learn the ways that spiritualities are in general, one assumes by looking at various example spiritualities and finding what they have in common, while also looking at the human spirit and listening to what it needs from these systems.

Praxes are I think going to be a big part of that – identifying and understanding the root praxis underlying each common need and method.

Note: “Praxis” is of course singular, while “praxes” is plural. Praxis is pronounced much like it looks – “prak-zihs”, rhymes with axis. Praxes is pronounced “prak-zeez”.